There is nothing radical about moral clarity in 2018

November 12, 2019

Leaders come in all shapes and sizes

For the majority of my business career, there's been one main pattern of leader. Look through the business section in any bookstore and you can see what that pattern has been: Drucker, Covey, Collins, Carnegie. Although this is the type of leadership that has gotten us here, I strongly believe this is not the type of leadership required to unrig our economic system.

For the duration of our democracy, political leaders have often matched this same pattern. The unspoken thing that happens is when these leaders don't share the hopes and struggles of the people they represent this translates into policies being created mainly serve people that pattern match the elected official. There's something particularly galvanizing about electing working people into positions of power like what happened with Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez on Tuesday night's NY primary. We need to elect thousands more like Alexandra.

One of the biggest obstacles in electing every day people with moral clarity is the way campaigning and governing has been done in the past. Elected government roles don't pay much thus being out of reach for working people who can't give up the economic cost of dedicating time without pay. Their obstacle is not because they don't care. It's simply the economic cost. Another obstacle has been campaigning itself. Viability of a candidate was decided previously by the parties previously based on how much you could raise or how connected your network already was to positions of power. This leads to people with access to power being tapped when positions become available. Thankfully, many hands have been working to make the technologies & processes we use better and scale training in a way that's never been done before.

I'm asking you, please, get in the Arena

Your community needs you. Your life experiences. Your understanding of people like yourself. Renters, working people, parents with young kids. Any type of person you see that currently is not in a decision making role. The stakes were raised even higher this week with the Supreme Court announcements. This is our moment. There's a bunch of ways to get involved. If you have digital skills, we need people to create content. If you are thinking of running down the road, we need people to help us run candidates this year. Learning the process is an excellent way to prepare yourself for the future.